This cemetery is for sale on Zillow. It comes with 33,000 quiet tenants

PHILADELPHIA -- A recent $1 million listing for Mount Vernon Cemetery on Zillow quickly went viral. But the post, like the cemetery itself, contains a few plot holes.

While the aerial photos show the North Philly cemetery’s 26 acres are completely reclaimed by nature (volunteers call the overgrowth “the green inferno”), the listing makes no mention of some other features that come with the property — including 33,000 dead bodies, legions of ticks, swaths of poison ivy, stuffed animals that appear in the night, and visitors who come seeking guidance from the beyond or portals to another dimension.

Buying Mount Vernon Cemetery, which is at Lehigh and Ridge Avenues across from Laurel Hill Cemetery, would be a big undertaking for anyone, but this property is also under conservatorship with the Philadelphia Community Development Coalition (PCDC), so any sale must be court-approved.

According to a news release issued after the listing was posted, PCDC’s “hope and expectation” is that the Mount Vernon Cemetery Conservation Company (MVCCC) will be able to raise enough money for the court to approve a transfer to the nonprofit. Listing the property on Zillow was “part of our legal obligation to transition ownership responsibly,” PCDC said in the release.

In other words, it was a legal requirement of the conservatorship. But as the post took off on social media and got picked up by Zillow Gone Wild — a popular account that features unusual Zillow listings — Brandon Zimmerman, volunteer coordinator with Friends of Mount Vernon, began fielding grave concerns from people whose ancestors are buried at the cemetery and those who worried it might be sold and developed.

“People were panicking … they got afraid they will move the bodies and it will become a Walmart. That will not happen,” Zimmerman said. “There are 33,000 people here and we don’t have accurate maps and records. You would have to do ground-penetrating radar over 26 acres to find everybody. There are infinitely cheaper and easier places. If you’re looking for the site of your next distribution center, Mount Vernon ain’t it.”

‘A chicken-and-egg problem’

The cemetery was placed into conservatorship with PCDC in May 2021 by the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas under the Abandoned and Blighted Property Conservatorship Act after its previous owner, Washington, D.C. lawyer Joseph Dinsmore Murphy, let it fall into disrepair and the grounds became inaccessible to the public for decades.

When permanent stewards for the property could not be found, MVCCC was created to receive the cemetery when the conservatorship ended, according to Thaddeus Squire, who manages MVCCC on behalf of its owner, the nonprofit Cultural Equity Realty Trust.

But first, MVCCC needs to raise $300,000, not to buy the cemetery — it would be transferred to the group for $1 — but to manage and maintain the grounds.

“We wanted to be assured we had money to do that before we receive the cemetery,” Squire said. “We don’t want an asset we can’t care for either and caring for it is just a matter of money.”

But raising money for a cemetery MVCCC doesn’t own yet has proven difficult. Currently, it has about $65,000 in pledges.

“There’s been a chicken-and-egg problem, the court needs us to have the money but nobody wants to give us the money until we have the cemetery,” Squire said. “If we can’t raise money and if there is no buyer I don’t know what happens, then we’re in a pickle.”

‘Crazy cast of characters’

Established in 1856 during the rural cemetery movement, when cemeteries began to be designed as green spaces and not just plots of land to house the dead, Mount Vernon is home to members of the Drew and Barrymore acting dynasties, Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers, and delegates to the Continental Congress.

While new plots haven’t been sold since 1968, burials still happen at plots already owned by families and people still visit their ancestors’ graves, Zimmerman said.

Today, foxes, deer, birds, and butterflies roam the cemetery and volunteers do their best to fight back the invasive plants taking over the monuments and grounds.

“The overgrowth is like nothing you’ve ever seen. You can cut vegetation and two weeks later, it’s up to your waist,” Zimmerman said. “I describe it as supernatural, it’s unreal.”

Given that it is a cemetery, other seemingly supernatural things do happen at Mount Vernon too. Zimmerman said one of his fellow volunteers once stopped a car full of little old ladies at the cemetery’s gate who told him they thought it was “a portal to another plane of existence.”

“It’s a crazy cast of characters both living and dead associated with that place,” he said.

Sometimes, stuffed animals will show up in the locked cemetery grounds. According to Zimmerman, the foxes who live there will sneak next door to Mount Peace Cemetery, steal the stuffed animals off graves, and bring them back to Mount Vernon to line their dens and play with.

And then there’s the man who throws empty candles over the fence filled with offerings to the dead and notes asking for help with some “pretty lewd things.”

“It would make you blush. He asks a particular woman who is actually buried in the cemetery for help with this,” Zimmerman said. “She’s been dead since 1933 and she’s buried there with her husband. Poor Linda, the things he is asking Linda to do.”

‘You can’t get rid of this’

If MVCCC is successful in raising funds, its goal is to maintain Mount Vernon as a greenspace and return it to its roots as a public park with a managed, native landscape, Squire said.

For too long Mount Vernon, which was a whites-only cemetery, has been inaccessible to the predominately BIPOC communities that surround it and MVCCC wants to change that.

“This is a space that was built as a white space. It has also been literally closed to the community and yet that community is its chief beneficiary and potential user,” Squire said. “We’re putting together a team of really interesting thinkers and folks who work on how Black and brown communities reclaim space in urban environments.”

This fall, Zimmerman hopes to hold a variety of tours, from ones about Mount Vernon’s art and architecture to others about notable burials there, in order to raise funds for the work the volunteers do. Follow their Instagram page for more information.

Zimmerman said he always gets the same reaction from people when they tour Mount Vernon. At first, they’re horrified at the overgrowth, but then they walk to the center of the cemetery where “everything is green.”

“I say ‘Just shut your eyes and listen and feel,’ and without fail, everyone says the exact same thing, ‘I can’t believe we’re in Philadelphia right now and you can’t get rid of this,’” he said.